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And so the murder victim was dumped into the blue-eyed grass, which, quite naturally, witnessed the whole sordid thing. But how much weight does testimony from plant life carry? There was a case, in Lithuanian, where a dumb-cane ratted on a counterfeiter, but I don’t think the jury was impressed. But I could be misremembering, as often happens on those shoulder days between winter and spring, between madness and lucidity. You know the days. They are neither fish nor fowl. And, while we are on the subject, evidentiary testimony from fish (or fowl) is highly unreliable, though in a pinch you may be happy to call on a rainbow trout to deliver that knockout punch you so desperately need to advance your fledgling career as a prosecutor. Because without successes, there’s no fame or notoriety or cranberry-colored sports cars. And without winter, there’s no spring. Still, it’s pretty hard to get a cogent statement from sedges or from any type of grass. The best one could hope for is that some members of the jury are so buoyed at seeing a clump of sorghum being dragged into court, leaving a messy trail of mud and detritus, which a gawky paralegal must clean up, that they buy into the sweet sorghum story.

So you can see that there are difficulties in getting non-sentient life forms to clinch a case for you, not because they don’t have anything to say, but rather that we are unlikely to understand their subtle language, which leads us again to madness.

Pictured is Sisyrinchium bermudiana, our national flower. It’s some sort of Iris, which explains why it’s so good at seeing clandestine cum murderous activity or at spying on the sun, a sort of self-imposed chaperone. The sun, that giant cyclops, watches us mercilessly, so why shouldn’t slender and graceful Irises watch it? Naturally it’s a rhetorical question, but I won’t hold that against anyone who feels compelled to provide an answer.

The staff, a ragtag bunch of closet fascists, at the Alliance of the Blessed Flower (a sanatorium) took us out for a field trip, and whereas most people, institutionalized or not, would have contemplatively admired the méli-mélo of ankle-high flowers at the arboretum, we crushed them mercilessly with our mud splattered boots. The Spaniards in charge of the flower squelchers were armed to the teeth–half of them expecting the blue-eyed among us to make a break for it and the other half just wanting to dress in the finery of the Guardia Real. Naturally when a doddering fool chained himself to a fire hydrant, there was consternation. But some of the inmates were acting strangely too.

Well, there’s a simple solution to this vexing problem. Plant a colorful tree behind the drab one and let the transformation begin.

As in the thrall of a well performed card trick, the spectator, we will call him Ace of Spades for the sake of verisimilitude, is distracted and then, through no fault of his own, dazzled–for his inadequate hardware (tired eyes and modest cerebellum) makes him as easy to fool as a voter exercising his democratic right on the strength of a glossy advertising campaign.

The short answer, predictably, is no. It’s not that the beauty of a wildflower doesn’t terrify me; it’s just that the mind of a collector, to whose fraternity I belong, is generally predisposed to seek the unusual and, dare I say, the grotesque–like a huckster at a carnival seeks to surround himself with nothing but the tallest and shortest of the splendid (though sometimes maligned) homo sapiens genus: in short, he dines in a wind ruffled tent with wise giants and wily dwarfs.

Notwithstanding some thorny issues (missing model release forms, bad lighting conditions, the flat tire the catering truck mysteriously succumbed to on the way to the gig (sabotage is still suspected)–the list goes on and I do not wish to bore you with a litany of excuses), my heartfelt thanks goes to Pachypodium geayi for being such an exemplary, though sharp-tempered, model.